Chapter 1312 — The Day the Fire Flowed

Amorn said nothing, only staring fixedly toward a certain direction in the darkness. The radiance wreathing him began to surge bright and dim, a powerful energy field rippling outward in layers around him. This obvious change finally roused Mirmyna's vigilance, and the former Goddess of Magic stared wide-eyed at her "roommate": "Wait, old deer, what are you planning to do…"

"I have to go… I must go…" Amorn's voice was low, and he kept striking the rock beneath his hooves with his forelegs. The boulder—formed from unknown matter of the Shadow Realm fused with fragments of the Voyager's alloy—was actually beginning to crack faintly under his strength. "Things are very bad over there. I see… I see a sea of fire, flowing through the darkness, and a blazing light falling down. I have to go help them…"

"Sit down!" Mirmyna glared, stepping forward to roughly press down on Amorn's head—but after exerting herself for a good while without success, she could only let go and continue glaring at him fiercely. "Get your head straight! Do you know what you're doing? Do you know what price you paid to sever the connection with your mortal believers? Even if you won't consider yourself, consider them—you go help them now, and then what? Would you have them commemorate this 'descent' and 'miracle' all over again? By then, never mind being dragged back—the future of those elves would be finished as well!"

Amorn shook his head vigorously. He had never heard Mirmyna speak so loudly; her shout, full of anger and uncontrolled surges of energy, left his mind ringing. But after a moment he still raised his head, eyes fixed on Mirmyna's as though gathering light within them: "I must go—not as the God of Nature. I go as 'Amorn.'"

"What nonsense are you talking?" Mirmyna shot him a glare, blinding electric light beginning to swirl above her hands. "No. Your head's gone bad. I need to cool you down…"

"I am calm. I know what I'm doing, and I know what consequences it may bring—but I have my reasons," Amorn's gaze swept past the lightning in Mirmyna's hands. His voice seemed calmer than before, yet also more resolute. "Not all help that stems from a higher power is a 'miracle.' If I were merely a mortal, could I not help them? And I needn't appear before them—I can help quietly from the sidelines, I can leave quickly…"

He paused briefly, then shook his head and said, "You know the laws behind how the gods operate. The crux is not what I do, but what they believe I did, what they believe they themselves can achieve. Reverence for the gods has been fading from their hearts for a thousand years, and so long as I act with a little care, it won't be taken for any 'miracle.' Perhaps…

"Perhaps it will simply be that something unbelievable happened, that some powerful beast… charged out of the forest… The deep woods hold all manner of things; they can explain it in time. The key is that right now, they need…"

"…Why are you explaining all this to me in such detail?" Mirmyna suddenly cut him off. The lightning in the Goddess of Magic's hands had dispersed at some point, and her voice had grown calm. She simply gazed quietly into Amorn's eyes and said in a low, slow voice, "It's enough that your head is clear—I'm not your guardian. I'm the one lodging with you, after all."

This time it was Amorn's turn to be astonished: "You… aren't stopping me?"

"I can't stop you. I can only advise—and now I find that my advice fails too," Mirmyna lowered her gaze. "Honestly, if I hadn't starved myself so harshly to break free of godhood and still hadn't recovered my strength, I really would want to forcibly hold you here…"

She shook her head, then looked at the sacred giant deer before her with singular seriousness: "I only want to confirm one thing—can you truly do what you say? When you see them bleeding everywhere, see them falling back step by step, see them crying out for help amid the flames—can you really guarantee that you will remain merely 'Amorn the mortal'?

"If you stay out of their sight, what you can do will be extremely limited, and the moment you cross the line even slightly… there will be no redemption for you."

Amorn met Mirmyna's gaze frankly. After a long while, he nodded gently and strode toward the deep darkness beyond the Defiant Court.

His figure vanished into the depths of the chaos.

"…So you did know the way out," Mirmyna said, watching the direction in which Amorn had disappeared. She gazed for a long time before slowly drawing back her eyes and looking at the surrounding arcane devices glimmering with various lights. After a moment's thought, she sighed helplessly. "Very well… now let me think about how to explain this to them… though they're probably already at their wits' end…"

……

The Supreme Administrative Hall was brightly lit. Intelligence from every channel was continually gathered before Hetty and Gaoyang, hurried footsteps and tense conversation echoing through corridor after corridor, while orderly streams of commands were distributed and relayed in the process—becoming the directives that drove this vast imperial machine, and the source from which many rebuilt their confidence.

The frontiers of the civilized world were facing an unprecedented challenge, yet the Empire's supreme governing apparatus still operated in order. So long as the lights of the Supreme Administrative Hall and Cecil Palace had not gone out, the situation remained in mortal hands—at least in the hearts of those steadfast Cecil folk, this was how the world ought to work.

Tossing the latest dispatch back onto the table, Gaoyun rubbed the space between his brows. His expression was stern, but there was little gloom or oppression in it.

The earth-shaking upheaval at the front had been relayed back to the imperial capital at the northern foot of the Dark Mountains at the first opportunity, and before long came intelligence concerning Typhon, the Silver Empire, and every other quarter—message after message from distant lands delivered in dense succession before their eyes, and from amid these reports emerged a situation that left everyone breathless.

The Grand Wall had "malfunctioned" for unknown reasons; the Sentinel Towers had ceased operation; vast numbers of breaches had appeared in the barrier around the wasteland; the aberration legions had swarmed out through them and, in the process, displayed a marked tendency toward discipline; frontline units had met the enemy in haste; the Typhon defense line was hard-pressed; contact with the Silver Empire and the Augustor Tribal Nations had been severed; and close on the heels of all this came the complete destruction of Sentinel Tower No. 98, forcing the Thorin root system—which had been slowly spreading toward the wasteland in a state of dormancy—to expose itself prematurely and transform into the "Greenwood Defense Line"…

Gao Yang had known all along that this grand campaign to "counterattack the wasteland" would inevitably run into complications, that things would never unfold as smoothly as everyone imagined.

But honestly, the scale of the "complication" unfolding before his eyes was a bit much.

Fortunately, at his core he was a terminal case of both "firepower deficiency paranoia" and "persecution complex," and even when there was "no real need," he had been frantically stockpiling contingencies out in the wasteland.

After all... from the very day he had kicked open his coffin and risen, he had suspected that the Wall was doomed, and now, looking at it, doomed it truly was.